Abstract

The widespread use of the Web has originated several new
data management problems, such as extracting data from
Web pages and making databases accessible from Web
browsers, and has renewed the interest in problems that
had appeared before in other contexts, such as querying
graphs, semistructured data and structured documents.
Several systems and languages have been proposed for
solving each of these Web-data management problems, but
none of these systems addresses all the problems from a
unified perspective. Many of these problems essentially
amount to data restructuring: we have information
represented according to certain structure and we want to
construct another representation of (part of) it using a
different structure. We present the WebOQL system, which
supports a general class of data restructuring operations
in the context of the Web. WebOQL synthesizes ideas from
query languages for the Web, for semistructured data and
for website restructuring.